Tag Archives: Vietnam

At the end of November, the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a British NGO, published a damning report on China’s involvement in the illegally logged timber trade. China’s rapid economic growth has seen the demand for timber and wood products for both domestic consumption and re-export increase substantially, earning its crown as the world’s biggest importer, consumer and exporter of timber and wood products. Laurence Caramel and Harold Thibault in The Guardian Weekly summarise some of the key findings of the report highlighting that public enterprises, which are often controlled by provincial governments, play a significant role in this lucrative trade.

Despite accusations of being “the largest importer of stolen wood”, China ironically has enforced strong measures to protect and grow its own forests, including a logging ban across 41.8 million hectares of natural forests and initiating a reforestation programme. Whilst the EIA acknowledge the Chinese Government’s forest conservation efforts, they argue that the gap between supply and demand has led to China “exporting deforestation to a host of countries around the world”.

On Monday, a report from Simon Speakman Cordall in The Guardian outlined the extent to which the Vietnamese forests, and the people who live there, are at risk from illegal loggers and poachers. Blaming economic and social problems such as unemployment and alcoholism on an increase of attacks on forest guards, Cordall explains how the Carbon and Diversity (Carbi) project, an alliance of the Vietnamese government, WWF and the German Development Bank, aims to facilitate a sustainable future for the people and the wildlife of the area whilst also acknowledging the conflict between the importance of conservation and the welfare of the people whose survival and livelihoods depend on forest access.

The complex nature of forest politics is demonstrated by Ivan Scales in his article for The Geographical Journal. Scales explores the relationships among environmental narratives, identity politics and the management of forest resources in Madagascar, a country that has received global attention for being one of the most biologically diverse places in the world but one that has also had its hardwood forests pillaged. He argues that more attention should be paid to local views and beliefs of the forest, particularly those associated with local practices of forest clearance, and that these should be incorporated into existing and future conservation policies.

As the global demand for timber increases, the challenges facing both conservationists and the communities who rely on the forests will intensify. These threatened forests are viewed as a global asset, however, rather than focussing on just the bigger issues it is clear that conservation policies need to focus more on how indigenous cultures understand and interact with their environment.

War changes everything. Societies and cultures, land and the environment, beliefs and approaches. Conflict establishes dangerous versions of ‘Us’ and the ‘Other’ – a timeless and effective means of dehumanising the enemy. Such distinctions are not only made between states or peoples, but between environmental types as well. In the thirty years following the Second World War, the tropics – from the Malayan jungles and Amazonia to East Africa – was ‘othered’ or, as Daniel Clayton (University of St Andrews) described, ‘tropicalised’ by Western powers and their Marxist enemies in counter-insurgency and anti-Communist wars.

American and British battles against Japanese forces in the Pacific and Asian theatres of World War Two introduced most military officials, politicians, and academics to the tropical jungle as a new and distinct battlefield space. As the United States, Britain, France, and Portugal became embroiled in a series of complex, violent conflicts in East Asia and Latin America, the tropical environment became an enigmatic, ‘militant’ world, ‘seductive’, lethal, and a comfortable breeding ground for far-left regimes (pp. 1-2). This mentality steadily matured into the Vietnam War.

Clayton approaches the tropical environment both as a ‘conceptual space’ and as a more traditional topographical/physical space (p. 2). ‘Tropicality’ soon conjured intense images of instability, distrust, and attrition in Western commanders’ minds. 1950s conflicts in Korea, Kenya, Vietnam, Guatemala, and Malaya cemented such fears in Western military teaching. Importantly, Clayton’s analysis reaches beyond common conceptions of tropical space, delineating between Western and indigenous understandings, the confrontation between intellectual and ideological elites, and the establishment of tropical myth – e.g., Ché Guevara’s controversial deification by Marxists after his 1967 capture and execution in Bolivia.

Western views of ‘tropicality’ appear to have been moulded from French surrealist philosophies cultivated in the wartime empire. Tropiques, published by Aimé Césaire in Martinique between 1941-1945, attacked Nazi/Vichy French amalgamations of the tropical Caribbean, French Polynesia, and West Africa into comfortable notions of ‘greater France’ (pp. 3-5). Instead, Césaire and his colleagues argued, the tropics was a dangerously seductive ‘Other’, an exotic, explosively vivid in colours, flora and fauna, sights, and sounds, very unlike Europe or North America. Césaire may not have sought to establish a rote dichotomy, but his project provoked notions of a confusing, contradictory non-Western environment at once fertile for colonial gains and as a centre of anti-colonial dissent. In the post-War world, the latter would take firm hold.

Cuban revolutionaries, in particular, propagandised their Marxist position through deft manipulation of tropical imagery and narrative. In so doing, they crafted a ‘third way’: indigenous constructions of the tropics – its benefits and dangers – that stood at odds with both traditional American and Soviet images of Cuba. In turn, Guevara and the Castros weaved together strains of ‘rugged terrain’ (pp. 5-8), local, hardened peoples and the culture, gender roles, jobs, and even music and art to fashion complex walls seemingly impenetrable to Western (particularly American) intervention. Other tropical revolutionary movements, such as the Viet Cong, closely watched and learned.